The Sunday Times Style Lecture with Tamara Mellon, Thursday 29 January 2009 at 6.30pm, London College of Fashion,20 John Princes Street, London, W1. Click here to get tickets

There are no half measures: most women would either love or loathe Tamara Mellon. And you can see why. Her life is like something out of a novel by Danielle Steel — the wealth, the power, the rehab, the marriage breakdown, the squabbles with her mother, the Botox, the jet-set life. A scriptwriter’s dream and, if it had all happened 40 years ago, a role tailor-made for Joan Collins.

With all that going on, it is inevitable that Mellon gets, if not a bad press, then certainly a chippy one. As the founder and president of Jimmy Choo, she is regularly profiled in financial publications, as well as appearing in all the gossip columns and party pages from London to LA. And if the shoes and business news fail, there is always the litigation to stop our attention wandering. In 2007, a high-profile court case involving Mellon and her former husband, Matthew Mellon — father of her six-year-old daughter, Minty — saw her accuse him of e-mail snooping. And in January this year, Tamara, who is estimated to have a personal fortune of about £100m, sued her mother, Ann Yeardye, a former Chanel No 5 model, for allegedly pocketing £5m from the sale of Jimmy Choo to Phoenix Equity Partners in 2004, a deal that enabled Mellon to develop the label to its present value of £200m.

So, we can safely say that Mellon has fully justified the loan of £150,000 from her late father, Tom Yeardye (the money man behind the Vidal Sassoon empire), that enabled her to set up Jimmy Choo in 1996. She admits that Yeardye was always her mentor, even when she was young. “My father and I talked about business every day,” she says. “He encouraged me to open a stall on Portobello Road when I was only 17, because he wanted me to learn how to trade. We sold slogan T-shirts and second-hand clothes, including some fabulous 1980s Alaïa, which I now really regret. I must have been absolutely mad.”

Mellon swears she won’t make the same mistake again. “I archive all my important pieces for my daughter to wear some day,” she says. “She loves fashion, and wearing high heels, even though she’s only six. For a special treat, we sometimes do fashion shows at home, just for fun. You can’t start too early.” As Mellon currently wears the hottest labels — Balmain and Balenciaga, along with Alaïa and Gucci (“vintage Gucci, of course”) — Minty is going to have a blue-chip fashion collection by the time she grows up.

Born in London in 1969, Mellon moved to Beverly Hills when she was eight, returning when she was 14 to go to Heathfield, then on to a Swiss finishing school. “Living in California as a child is the reason I understand the American market,” she says. “Also, my boyfriend [Christian Slater] lives in LA, and I’m there at least every month to six weeks, as well as tripping back and forth to New York.” She loves American fashion and collects vintage Halston from the 1970s and 1980s. She loves it so much that, in conjunction with the movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, she bought the label and relaunched it in 2007.

If Mellon has anything, it is self-belief and determination. “That comes from her father,” a family friend says. “It’s in the genes. He started with absolutely nothing and ended up a multimillionaire. He was the most determined and focused man, and he trained Tamara to be the same. When she was young, he used to match every penny she earned to motivate her to work hard. Just like him, she loves holding the winning cards.”

Mellon agrees: “My father always used to say, ‘You have to learn to work. If you don’t, you won’t get anything from me.’ ” She did learn to work, with a job as accessories editor on British Vogue, surely the best possible grounding for what was to come. She also learnt to play — rather too hard. She was an It girl in the late 1990s, partying with Tara Palmer-Tomkinson and Tamara Beckwith, but that part of her life came to an end when she checked into rehab, a period she now feels was a positive one: “I had time to think, to assess what I wanted, and I came out and bought Jimmy Choo.”

Mellon had frequently visited Choo’s Hackney workrooms when she was at Vogue, often having him create shoes for a shoot. With her father as chairman of the new company, she opened a shop that she filled with the sort of shoes she liked to wear. “It was only logical,” she points out. “I am the customer. I understand the lifestyle. I know what sort of shoes women in my world need. I have the ideas and Jimmy’s niece designs them for me.” From the first collection, her Knightsbridge shop became a magnet for the international super-rich and sexy.

Since buying Jimmy Choo, Mellon has moved fast, and is now seen less as a society princess and more as a driven businesswoman. According to a family friend, she “pushed forward her label ruthlessly, as if she had a presentiment that her adoring father would not always be there to give her the emotional support she needed”. Yeardye died suddenly in 2004, and Mellon is convinced it was because of a tabloid article linking him to the Krays.

The empire sails on — testament to the ballsy approach Mellon learnt from her father — with new shops opening in Paris, Milan, Beijing, Shanghai and Mumbai. “By the end of 2009,” she says, “we will have 100 stores. This is a good time to expand. Prime real estate always comes up for sale in a crisis, and at a good price.” She laughs. “I always said I was determined to own a truly global brand. I didn’t buy Jimmy Choo just to have a couple of shoe shops in London, did I?”

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